Posts by Bernt Oestergaard

Switch off Hinckley Point

Re: They are so efficient that if the UK switched over to LED lighting, the nation could save 10 per cent of its electricity bill and do without eight new power stations

I think Tim's assessment omits the decentralization of power generation that is inherent in 12V DC LED home lighting. I reckon a standard 90x165cm solar cell array connected to a 12V battery can run up to 80 LED light fixtures in the home - should be enough for most private homes. Great way to save that huge wad of dosh being sunk into the bottomless Hinckley Point pit.

Valuable Europeans?

Yes, you have to wonder why the European cards are 5x the US ones. The simple answer is the European use of chip bank cards, which US banks are reluctant to issue to their customers due to the additional manufacturing cost - they seem to prefer their customers being ripped off because of lousy magnetic card security. How long will the US consumers accept this logic that is costing them a fortune?? Paris because she probably has a US bank card as well, but can afford the losses

"Most emergency services use TETRA, or one of its predecessors" - yea, that's the problem

Comparing TETRA with LTE is apples and oranges or more precisely - comparing blue-light emergency service with a global consumer comms solution.

TETRA has a horrible evolution history both as a standard and as a service. It should not be the model for standard setting in any forum. For years TETRA UK fought against TETRA France (TETRA Pol), while Motorola in the US with its Agenda 25 service tried to monopolize US Blue-light services. After decades of infighting and the lives of many firefighters, ambulance and police endangered by this politically fraught standard (not to mention huge cost overruns), TETRA is finally delivering some useful services (Motorola is betting on both TETRA and Agenda 25). 3GPP on the other hand has chugged along and rolled out standards at a steady pace. It should not be swayed by anything coming from the TETRA camp. The bullhorn is because that is where TETRA came from.

Verizon - first to join?

With Verizon's endorsement of the Nokia Lumia Windows 8 mobe, helping Microsoft's Skype outfit onto the mobile phone bill seems a logical next step. It would be interesting to see how the Apple vs. Microsoft/Skype revenue model looks like from the mobile operator perspective: less handset subsidy certainly and more carrier visibility into skype usage patterns.

There is a very good reason why it takes specialists to comprehend complex data

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong as H. L. Mencken once wrote. Oh… and Lotus Notes with an ‘activity stream’ on an iPad with remote wipe is a sign of its relevance in the post-PC age? Wow!

While I entirely agree that data analytics is going to bring us some pretty amazing improvements in our ability to detect ‘data anomalies’ (real-time traffic pattern analysis, DLP, zero-day malware etc.), it really requires you to ask the right questions before the answers make any sense. Merely streaming data in ‘Twitter formats’ to business users’ devices – is just so much more - digital exhaust. Sherlock, because this figure actually understands complexity.

Reflected light is a much bigger solar energy problem

The solar efficiency record is today around 42% and going on 50%, so the theoretical max. claims by this research seem somewhat outdated – also because solar cells lose effect fast with rising temperatures. Rather, I would expect significant solar energy efficiency gains to come from better optics because the refractive index on solar cells is 3.5 and its has not yet been possible to produce a surface with a graded refractive index between 1 and 3.5 which would lead all incoming light to the solar cells. Solving this problem would stem the considerable loss of energy in today’s systems. A beer to the research that solves this issue!

Wireless??? Come into my parlor...

You may be getting your acronyms crossed. The WAC community is the Wholesale Apps Community, I believe. Also seems that HP is getting in on the action with a WAC clearinghouse for the three Korean mobile telcos. So telcos are getting dressed up - now we just need some apps developers to come join the party. Mine's the WTF - Wireless Tllco Fraternity

We are also still short on standards here

Virtualized and cloud environments certainly changes the security equation, and next step needs to be some agreements among cloud and virtualization providers on best practice security recommendations, or in the case of public cloud services, a security standard that could become part of the GRC (governance risk compliance) process that most enterprise customers have to go through. I'm keeping my eye on blue guy with the X-ray lenses from CSA, the Cloud Security Alliance, for that.

Really badly researched article!!

"Danish ISP Sonofon (part of Tele2) has once again been ordered by a Danish court to block the controversial Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay."

NO, Sonofon is owned by Norwegian incumbent Telenor, not the Swedish Tele2. And NO Sonofon is not involved in the case at all! The verdict and the court case relates to Tele2 a Danish ISP owned by Swedish Tele2.

"However, the IFPI may have picked the wrong ISP: Sonofon does not have substantial broadband operations in Denmark and is losing market share. Also, Tele2 could still take the case to the Supreme Court."

Right, that's because Sonofon is a mobile operator i.e. NO broadband - for Torrent hungry users ignoring the fluffy 3G mobile data option. The Danish Telenor ISP with broadband operations is a company called Cybercity.

The journalist also missed a juicy element of the case: the only expert witness at the court hearing, technical director Kristian Løkkegaard from a security company name Dtecnets Software was a former employee of the prosecuting law firm representing the IFPI. As is plainly stated in the guys profile on LinkedIn, but no one bothered to tell the court that,

User friendliness is key

Wireless USB offers the user friendliness that Bluetooth lacks, along with higher speeds and lower power consumption than Bluetooth - forget all the profiles, it's plug and pray. However today it's still at the clunky dongle development stage and will need major vendor commitments before it's a real threat.

And just what does the QoS 'Guarantee' mean?

Is Tiscali ready to put its money where its DSL 'voice' quality is? Seems to me that QoS guaranteed services should cost the provider something if quality isn't met. This requires a sevice level guarantee where the customer can check that he is getting the quality he is paying for and when he isn't getting that quality that he is reimbursed in some way.